Our arrival right back where we began, nearly 17,000km (10,000+ miles) and a week short of a year later -- what a trip!

- Depart beginning September – Evan inadvertently steals Andy’s passport, trip start delayed to September 23

- Take a trial run to the Great Wall before departure – Air France leaves Alexis’s bike in Paris an extra 24 hours, destroying our time gap

- Drink that expensive bottle of Champagne Alexis brought from France before we leave to consecrate the journey – We put it in the fridge and forgot it there in our rush to leave early on day 1

- Leave early on day 1 – Right before we hit Tian’anmen, Andy remembers he left his gloves and iPhone charger at his friend’s house; returns solo to fetch them leaving Alexis and me at a hutong restaurant next to Xidan and pushes our departure from Beijing to around noon

- We all wake up at 8am on day 2 to make the most of the cool morning – I write this post at 9:30 between two sleeping baldies

Thankfully we at least made it to Hebei Province yesterday (yes, we crossed a deep 4km into it before settling down) as we had promised everybody who asked us where our first stop would be. However, the point here is that as long as we keep humble expectations of our own abilities and overestimate China’s proclivity for throwing us curves, we ought to do fine – at least in terms of expectations. Now that we’ve all slept over 10 hours, maybe we can actually plan to go out and find some LBXes – knock on wood.

Recently, I personally have been a bit worried about our physical condition. Evan has done the most biking recently, with trips up and down the California coast and a few weeks spent in Taiwan. I have taken only a handful of long-ish rides over the past three months, while Alexis has never gone on a long bike ride before. In the three weeks we were in Beijing waiting for my visa and passports, we didn’t even get out on one decent ride. Our bikes are all fully loaded with gear and are extremely heavy. One of these days it’d be nice to come across a hotel or a family with a scale, so we could figure out how much we are each carrying. Nevertheless, once we got up to speed, we cruised along on the flat and well-paved road out of Beijing. Our goal for the day was only to get to Hebei province, which is where we told everyone we’d end up. Failing to make it out of Beijing would be far too embarrassing. Beijing is massive. Our total ride today was 70km to a town called Gu’an in Hebei province, but the town itself is only about four kilometers into Hebei.

After a late lunch near the China Watermelon Museum (strangely, I have been there once before, five years previously) in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing, we pulled into Gu’an at around 4:30. Coming into Gu’an was like passing through a demolition zone. Actually, it wasn’t like passing through a demolition zone — it was a demolition zone. It seemed like everything for two or three kilometers on our way into the town was a massive pile of bricks and rubble. The Chinese government lists Gu’an as a “development zone,” and when they say something like that anywhere near a major city like Beijing or Shanghai, they mean it. After we made it through the rubble, we quickly found a cheap hotel to stay in. For the first two weeks while we get acclimated to what we’re doing, I imagine we will be staying in a number of hotels before we try out more camping and hopefully staying with people we meet. But the price is right — we’re each paying a little less than $1.50 to share a 3 person room…and we got to shower.

I spent a little time walking around town with my camera while Alexis and Evan showered. I am always amazed at how quickly Chinese people change from basically ignoring foreigners in Beijing or Shanghai (because we’re everywhere and nothing special anymore) to exclaiming “Look, a foreigner!” or yelling “HALLO!” from a passing car. When we finally get away from the urban centers on the east coast, maybe people will even start complimenting me on my Chinese again!

Basically, years of living in China’s biggest cities have finally worn me down.  What once was the greatest adventure in my life has turned into an endurance contest against pollution, political insanity, and mind-bending imbalance and ugliness.  I suppose everything is interesting while it’s novel, but after novelty has worn off, just like a shotgun wedding to a stripper in Vegas, all you’re left with is a reality you understand more than you thought you could and wish you could either unlearn or dismantle.

Now that last paragraph might make it sound like I hate China.  That’s as far from the truth as possible.  I love China.  I love its culture, its people, its food, its values (of course I refer to its traditional values which ought to be on an endangered species list) and even all those crazy little idiosyncrasies that drive a lot of foreigners nuts.  What I don’t love, however, is what is happening in China today.  It’s unfortunate that China’s identity has of late been completely intertwined with those people who are supposedly its vanguard.  That’s why I had to go to Taiwan to see what “China” looks like when its “vanguard” is (judgment reserved) different.  What I saw there conformed more with widely and personally held conceptions of “China,” and I liked it.  Hell, the whole inspiration for this trip in the first place was a ride through some of China’s most beautiful expanses, in beautiful, more wild places that the vanguard has — likely due to geographic inconvenience — been unable to whitewash for the sake of uniformity and “progress.”

So now, today, September 21, 2009 here we are, three foreigners who love China and have come here to the very heart of China and find that there’s just no China to be found, and what’s taken its place is unsettling in the way Marlow found Africa’s dark heart, with the exception that our horror has been revealed to us incrementally over years.  We found that we’ve been spending our lives wading through a cultureless cesspool, and for the last who-knows-how-long have been basking therein and complaining about it.  Now, thanks to divine inspiration and crystallization of willpower, we have realized that our calling is not to sit in the muck and be angry about it, but to go out and find out what beauty still exists, and to record as much of it as we can before it is lost.  Maybe, just maybe, we can find a way during our year to even preserve some of the beauty we find — that would be ultimate fulfillment of our role as human beings and stewards of the world.  Who knows how much we, the ignorant but passionate youth we are, can achieve, but now, our ambition solidified, we will heed the call to action.

Now we are both back in Beijing and in a holding pattern. You see, when Evan was helping me move out of my apartment in July, he noticed my passport sitting in a drawer and, recognizing its vast importance, put it in his bag for his version of “safe keeping.” A couple days later, I realized that my passport was missing and after tearing apart everything I still owned, we declared the thing lost. I spent the last week of my working time in Beijing running around getting the requisite documents together and spending another pile of money for an emergency passport and to get my visa transferred into the emergency passport before leaving for America five days later. I arrived in the States and signed into my email account to find an apologetic email from Evan, who had unknowingly handed my passport to the lady at the check-in counter at the airport while on his way to Taiwan. Well, what’s done is done, but our original expected departure of early September has come and gone as we wait for my new passport, for my visa to be transferred into said new passport and for my visa to be renewed. Our hope was to leave by the 19th, but that dream too has now faded.

But the whole ordeal is not without its positive side. Another member has been added to our cycling team, pushing us closer to our half-serious dream of a Forrest Gump-style following as we make our trip around China and attempt to grow beards. Evan’s French friend Alexis recently left his job at CCTV’s French channel (okay he was asked to leave) and intends to join us for the entire journey. Our delayed departure will allow us to all leave together from Beijing rather than having him meet us somewhere out on the road. Alexis will be contributing a French-language travelogue to the site, which we’re pretty excited about.

But for now we wait.

Just happy to be trimming trees with a tiny saw.

A (presumably) homeless man crosses the street at Caihong Bridge in Beijing. As is the case in numerous other developing countries (think: Slumdog Millionaire), many of China's supposedly homeless actually work for organized begging rings -- an incredibly sad situation in itself, but even more so because it brands all beggars as cheats, which surely must make it difficult for those actually in need to find a helping hand.

Evan is in Beijing for 10 days and we took a bike ride last weekend to Sancha Village below the Great Wall. The family we stayed with consists of a husband and wife, who rent out a couple rooms in their house and cook meals, and their elementary school-aged son, who they send to live in the city with a relative during the week to attend school. They also take care of this mentally disabled man, who is friendly and endearing, but doesn't say much. I asked him if I could take his photo, and he closed his eyes and gave me a smile. He is lucky, though. So many of China's disabled citizens have no one to take care of and love them, and many of them wake up to the sight of the underside of an expressway rather than to fresh air, sun and green mountains.

I'm posting this in the spirit of the music festivals that usually occur around this time of year in China. This picture was actually taken at Midi two years ago. Unfortunately, Midi this year was moved outside of Shanghai and the Modern Sky Strawberry Music Festival took its place. I have some pictures from that, but haven't had time to edit them yet. Besides, all the metal heads seemed to be down south at the Midi festival, so Beijing had a much mellower crowd this time around. Volumes have been written about the history of rock in China. I will just say that rock music used to be a somewhat subversive genre in terms of lyrics and the people who followed it (think Cui Jian performing under the Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square, 1989), but now it is much more commercialized and the lyrics are rarely politically charged. Still, this guy is not exactly a poster child for the CCP.